


Tellurion

by betelgeza



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:15:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27884353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betelgeza/pseuds/betelgeza
Summary: Bertolt thinks the whole world is purring with his heartbeat.That if you touch the dark soil with your fingertips, it would resonate, moved deeply by everything that Bertolt cannot say. And in the middle of the night, apart from the source of voices, only the rhythmic tone of the blood pumped in his chest is heard.Rei-ner. Rei-ner. Rei-ner.
Relationships: Reiner Braun/Bertolt Hoover
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Hand-to-hand combat torments him the most. They require constant interaction with the other person. Attack, counterattack, analysis. An evaluation. A comment. An answer.

He closes his eyes. (When was it..?)

A talk. Scripted dialogue recited by actors playing their little phony roles.

(Oh yes, It was probably fall.  
A comedy for kids, behind the scene of the mobile theater, that one single time, when comedians were allowed to perform in ghetto. A colorful doghouse on wheels made of pink and yellow planks and little black horse. No, not a horse. A pony. And the curtain, of course. And two puppets on the director's hands. The thumb and middle finger were moving the wooden arms and the index finger bent the wooden neck. Yes, that would be correct, more than once he felt like someone's index finger bent his neck. To the chest, to the knees. Down to the ankles. To the muddy ground. To the oak coffin–)

"Don't be distracted!"

A sudden pain in his jaw brings him back, hot string of the abused nerve of his face. He opens eyes widely. Marco is standing opposite with a slightly apologetic look on his face, but he keeps his guard on. He bends his knees lightly with the attitude of a shy boxer. Dust raised by the rest of the participants is floating around. (Traces of a dancing pony in the sand.)

"Sorry, but in a real fight your opponent won't let you go, you know?" Marco waved his fist in the air to emphasize his words.

What a beautiful lesson, may no one ever forget it, Marco.

"It's my fault," mutters Bertolt with dismay. "Let's fight."

He never wins. Pair practice and hand-to-hand combat do not count towards the final score as Annie has noticed, ever the perceptive. It simply. Doesn't. Matter. He dragged out the fight until the instructor passed them and gave up immediately.  
As two meters high man, he didn't think he had anything to prove to his opponents, usually a head shorter.  
Besides, real fights never look like this. There are no punches marked with letters in a 'how-to' book with accurate drawings. There is no time to rethink an artificially bred strategy. Nobody ever stops an attack in the middle and says 'Damn, wait buddy, cause I've fucked this move set up'.

"Change!"

The instructor's voice brings him back to reality. His bruised jaw twitched, familiar needle stings through lower bone. What a nasty, sultry day. He tries to run his tongue over his teeth, but sharp pang of discomfort advises him otherwise. Air is hot. He glances up. White sky hangs over him and is choking him since morning. The uniform wet with sweat and dirty with rusty dust. What a tiring long summer.

"Can we?"

Bertolt looks down. Oh... Mikasa. Brave and dark-eyed Mikasa, efficient and effective, taut like a violin string. Shit, it is no disgrace for any soldier to lose to her. Besides as they say she's worth a hundred men of arms – and how could you fight one hundred opponents alone? Yet sometimes when they meet each other he imagines if he would have any real chances with her. She was potent, although so different from Annie. She didn't carry out a series of precise movements, she just let her instincts grab her, or so it seemed. He couldn't recall her using the same combination of moves twice. She was flowing with a strange current that was incomprehensible to others, which was telling her what to do and she never questioned it, just complied.  
She was extremely strong for a woman too.  
Bertolt would use all his strength, every inch of his body. It would be a nasty fight.  
He jerks away suddenly, avoiding hit to his jaw. If he has to be beaten down, maybe some other place at least. She tries to hit him from the other side, but he managed to get around that as well. She has to notice that he was not attacking her, but she never minds his apathy. She never preaches any paramilitary gospels like others. With monotonous expression on the face, with a boring but melodic voice she acts as she is practicing with gym dummy. 

Moon-like-girl, which shines only with reflected light – as Annie spatted one day.

He found it unfair then. Annie, aren't we all just satellites? Chunks of coal trapped in a gravitation of someone's body.  
And just like in a fairy tale, enchanted to stone for our stupidity, we wait for someone's efficient spell to bring us back to life. Lucky Mikasa found this spell, and it sounds like this: "Eren". That one word amazingly brought her back to life. What a trick! Eren, Eren. Because if she had to defend Eren, oh that's another story. If she had to protect Eren and Bertolt had to protect...  
He looks at the other recruits unconsciously. He is looking for–

"Bertolt, wake the fuck up!" bellowed Keith, which grew out of the ground.

In the same second, Mikasa leaps forward, fast, faster than the blink of an eye. Bertolt instinctively jerks back, pushed by the memory of his muscles, and without thinking he kicks the sand in the girl's eyes.  
Dirty move, one of cheap cards of Zeke's deck.  
Dust and small stones flew into Mikasa's face, she stops – blinking violently and tries to wipe the face with her hand. But Bertolt does not take advantage of the moment. It is not such a fight, not here, not for a small wooden knife. (It simply. Doesn't. Matter.) Keith was no longer looking, preoccupied with harassing others.  
Suddenly he fell to one knee, cut by a nasty side kick. He puts his arm over the back of his kidneys in panic, but he doesn't get a second shot.  
Mikasa does not continue, she always stops when Bertolt is no longer defending himself. She is perceptive. Too confident to use pointless actions too.

'Thanks for the exercises' she spokes each time, softly, a little out of breath.

"Ah, well, tha–"

But this day she doesn't wait for his answer. She stares between the fighters. Surprised, he follows her gaze.  
Ah yes, Eren.  
Eren and Annie. And Reiner. Reiner... Bertolt takes a step towards them, but Mikasa's sudden movement holds him back. The girl moves quickly towards the fighting group, with a fierce expression on her face, changed. Bertolt is not a specialist in expressing his feelings, but others are strangely clear to him at such moments.  
Those pursed lips, those upright shoulders.  
Well that's obvious. Hot pressure in the chest, rising to the head, somewhere behind the eyes. Anyway, Jean Kirstein could say something about that too, right? And what would Bertolt say?  
He would say... (Reiner's hand patting Eren on the back. Reiner's side stroking Mina.)  
He would say... (Reiner's eyes turning to Krista.)

"Annie, wait! It's not like that, there is a method for this!"

"Annie, leave him alone!"

It plays out quickly. Mikasa tries to yank Eren backwards, away from Annie's reach. The astonishment on Eren's face. Annie is standing, emotionless, eyes directed towards Mikasa, knees slightly bent, dominant leg receding a little bit back. She lifts the heel, breaks the friction of the floor, tightens the joint. Bertolt saw it a couple of times, a blow capable of knocking a guy out. Blow capable of breaking an adult human femur. Strong. Possibly too strong as a counterattack for another woman, however...

'My punches work on humans, not monsters,' mocks Annie.

(The monsters live under children's beds, where they sew bands for the ghetto inhabitants, and Annie should know that no kicks will scare them away.)

And then that poor, ignorant Eren.

"Mikasa, let me go!"

The tall figure suddenly stands between women. Reiner. Did he see that foot receding? This heel? 

"Beautiful girls, let me remind you that these are exercises and it's all about improve–"

A quick movement cuts the sentence in half, and the man sharply grips his face. Berthold feels the needle in his lungs. Everything seems to freeze for a moment.

"Thank you Reiner, you are right, brave and just as usually," snickers Annie.

She turns, slim and delicate. Suddenly the tension of the moment falls on her, she quickens her pace and runs beyond the practice square, as in a poorly written theater scene, where the author lacked an idea how to lead the actress out.  
Eren jerks an elbow out of Mikasa's grip, calls out some words, but Bertolt can't hear what exactly anymore.  
Everyone disappears, curtain.

Reiner, alone, is kneeling in the square, holding his sweatshirt sleeve to his nose. Some people only now turn their heads and remain still, surprised. Bertolt quickens his pace and raises his hand to show that there is no problem, he's got this one.  
The fawn military cotton darkens with the thin red blood, a red trickle leaks through the fingers, falls to the sand. Red balls roll on the sand. On a hot day like this they will roll and roll, many hours until late at night. In the cool darkness of the night they will clot somewhere along the way.

(In the morning they will find small ruby pebbles arranged in the name 'Marcel'.)

Bertolt shakes his head.

He kneels carefully beside his friend. Reiner looks up at him after a long moment, smiles wryly, but his smile does not reach his eyes.

"She did not break anything. She can hit so as not to break."

"I know," whispers Bertolt. "Hurts?"

Reiner groans softly, as if that one question hurt him more than the punch itself. 

"Only when I breathe," he jokes through bloody teeth.

His voice breaks on the last syllable, wheezing, like a kicked dog. Bertolt unfolds the wet tissue he had previously soaked in the exercise water tank and gently places it onto the man's neck.

"Bend down the head."

Reiner obediently tilts his head forward. He does not take his eyes off the growing stain in the sand. A blade of sweat cuts through the burning forehead, a drop falls from the eyebrow to the eye.  
He shakes his head furiously. He is angry, so angry.

"Calm down. Mad, you'll make it leaks longer."

"I know," snarls Reiner. Suddenly his shoulders drop, he lets out air. It seems like it's somehow more than he could breathe into his lungs. "I know."

"Its not her fault," says Bertolt reassuringly.

A dark spot drips from the nose to the mouth, and from the corner of the mouth, it reaches beyond the jawline. Reiner's eyes are closed, his long lashes casting a shadow on his cheeks. Bertolt thinks of little Annie, dreamy Annie. About her inventive father who sometimes shows up for their warrior training.

"Be fair, it's not her fault," he repeats almost silently, inaudible to others.

Reiner gives him an unreadable look. After a while, he stands up sluggishly, too heavy for his young age. He blows violently through his nose, wipes his face with a cloth that is almost dry. He holds out his hand to Bertolt. Movement is swift, unfaltering. Bertolt grabs his hand. He does not use Reiner's strength, his own body lifts him. But touch opportunity is as good as any other.

"I think enough of these exercises already, huh? Especially when they give us fucking nothing." 

Reiner looks around strangely pleased, some people are still exercising, some pretending to be exercising, and some have long since deserted as soon as Shadis and his petty absentees disappeared.

"If I don't get off of this sweaty rag, I'll go insane!"

"Lets go," smiles Bertolt. "I want to eat. Maybe someone left something in the room."

On the way to the barracks, Reiner lost himself in a chatter, who lost, who won, what stupid events happened during training and so on, as if it has any matter. Bertolt did not speak. He suspects it's just a prattle, nothing more and that Reiner is still thinking about Annie.  
A reluctant Annie who could not find an outlet for her aggression even during the fight and training and because of that she focused on Reiner.  
Leave him alone, he wants to tell her. He's not well, leave him alone, he doesn't deserve more.  
But Bertolt is silent each time, unable to swallow the delicate bones of words.

You have to be just - everyone who is taking care of someone tends to repeat that. Little Annie, whom no one had ever said that even a worm deserved more than a death inflicted with such indifference.

Yes, you have to be just. And yet - somehow no one really praise justice itself.


	2. Chapter 2

What surprises him most in the barracks is the noise of conversations. The conversations never end. Excited dialogues, violent gestures and accelerated intonations. Everyone says something constantly. Everyone thinks about something constantly. And the biggest puzzle - nobody thinks about what he is saying.  
Oh, they talk about everything. About the tasks completed on a given day, about the daily successes and achievements, about the points gained during the exercises.

As far as Bertolt knew – what was mostly said was untruth.

Little has been achieved, little has been succeed, not many points were scored.

And the days passed, each one quickly, closer and closer to the Great End, where only those in top ten could count on a safe future under the king's silky gown.  
And there were definitely more than ten cadets.

"I'm telling the truth as long as it's not too boring," beautiful Pieck whispered in his ear once.

Well, yes. It was that, too. 

Boredom. 

But this does not surprise him as much as the others. During his training in Liberio, he mostly remembered boredom. Tiredness and exhaustion – yes, but mainly boredom, terrible repetition of everyday. Maybe that was why he had already gotten used to it, but he understood that it was an unpleasant novelty for others, too.

He looks down at his plate, which has been completely empty for some time. He sighs as he reaches for a cup of hot tea. This is the third or fourth tea in a row. Flooding your stomach with hot water was also part of the boredom in Liberio.   
It turns out that you can travel half the world just to get not enough food in the end, just like at home. There are few such great disappointments in a traveler's life as this one. In fact, he was one of the few who did not laugh at Sasha's culinary tragedy. In another life they might probably get along pretty well.

Eh, what a nasty habit.   
There is no other life. There is no travel. There are no completed exercises, no points scored.

There is only the noise of voices, hysterical laughter all around and this depressingly empty cheap plate.

He shakes his head and stares at the flickering flame of a candle lighted on the table. It stands timidly in a puddle of wax.  
A sudden, loud noise pulls him out of his thoughts. He looks down automatically at the source of the sound.   
A plate – with half of the evening meal was thrown on his own one. He turned back and saw Annie leaving the room. She didn't look back, closing the door silently behind her.  
She rarely does it nowadays, a food-sharing with them, in fact she has stopped at all lately.  
Probably does not want to attract attention or emphasize their relationship with each other. Although... he honestly doubted it. Nobody paid any concern to her haunting anyway. Besides, no one was paying any real attention to him either, if Bertolt must be honest. When they got used to his large body, he could ghost around rather easily. They were two phantoms, quiet and ghastly adaptive.   
At night, they were fluttering the long window curtains, killing the time, waiting patiently for the first light of dawn.

"Probably half of this is for me," Reiner says quietly, wrinkling his bruised nose suggestively.

"...Sadly, we are not sure about that," argues Bertolt, trying to lightly push the plate towards himself.

Reiner makes no comment and reaches over Bertolt's shoulder gracefully.

"I can't believe what bullshit you are talking about Jean. You are so dumb that this poor damn horse which carries you on his back, is staying later in the stable ashamed!" 

"That was actually a good one," Reiner snorts.

"Ah, Eren probably, judging by the volume," says Bertolt, watching with resignation how the potatoes disappear from his plate.

"Fucking hell Eren, you are right, I forgot that you graduated from fucking university before you started cutting down house-sized puppets."

More laughs.  
Bertolt turns to the table where Eren and the others are sitting. It's like an evening radio program he used to listen back in the ghetto. 'The comment of the day', or some other shitty, inadequate title. Anyone who sits alone at night and feels lonely or lost are more than welcome to play a program in which Eren and Jean would insult each other on the pretext of the random topic being discussed. Maybe there would be an economic survey or a weather forecast after? Every once in a while there would be a discussion with a guest guy who would try to speak but no one would ever listen to him. And finally – one swift movement of the wrist and there would be silence.

"I can't stand your fucking jabber"

Unfortunately, this program was not going to end here. Volume goes up.

"You don't give a damn about everything so much that I want to puke as soon as you open your shitty mouth. You are nothing but narrow-minded moron!"

In fact, Bertolt forgot how much he enjoys listening to music, the artificial radio tones floating in the air. He would love to hear one of these gentle, evening concerts so much ... (there are no completed exercises, no points were scored, there is no other lif–)

"Eren, come on... Please guys!" This is definitely Armin, today's special guest. Although because of noise there is no chance of it, he tries to share his issue with the viewers.  
"Jean, that's not the point...!"

"Armin, don't loose your energy. Eren won't shut up at this moment. We all have to sit and listen to how the goddamn world around us works because we have no fucking idea about it if Eren doesn't tell us"

"You little shit, shut up!"

"Tell us about the ocean, because you haven't pressed it in our throats today"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up! There is no place for such an ignorant thrash!"

"Eren, calm down!"

Suddenly there were sounds like a heavy bench sharply pushed back, a clink of glass, and a torn fabric.

"Fuck! You'll pay for this rag with your muzzle, you dick!"

More clangs and screams.   
Reiner sighs. The candle fuse, choked with molten wax, shudders and fades quietly.  
Thank you for your attention, we invite you tomorrow evening for the next program.

"Uh... I don't want to listen it anymore," someone next to them says. "It's somehow... kind of sad today."

"Because it's been repeated a million times already and that's it. There will be something new, then you will laugh just fine."

"...As if that was not enough, it's the second week with the same food. It's not sad, it's tragic."

There was scuffling, crackling, thumps, and slowly everyone began to disperse. In the meantime, someone separated the fighters and the room finally began to quiet down. Bertolt tries to pick up anything from the stripped plate with a knife, but gives up after a few fruitless attempts. He puts the cutlery on the plate.  
For a moment he considers to approach the pile of plates at the kitchen tables, where the kitchen helpers were taking dirty dishes to clean, but the discouraged expression of Sasha lurking there clearly said that it was not worth the trouble. The almost quiet room of the canteen starts darkening, and without the mass of people warming the air with feverish breaths from the opened black windows seeps cool night air, so pleasant as opposed to the heat of the day. Suddenly he felts very tired. He got up, but before he could move towards big doors, someone hit him with his body.

"Oh! Sorry Bertolt... uh, you know how it is.." Armin says apologetically, and run after Eren who is marching forward angrily, who is pushing ahead like a sled horse, filled with the conflict of the evening, making his way through the dinner marauders without pardon.

Bertolt knows, indeed. He had heard of the cleansing arguments. Of such fights even! That kind which relieve tension and bad atmosphere, and bring peace and sense of friendship. They supposed to be necessary even at some moments.  
But in practice he has never seen any. There was a scream, yeah, there was violence - sure. But somehow never peace.

Nobody ever said in the end: "It was good to be hit in the face, I understood many things!" or "I had this feeling I wasn't entirely right but when they beat the shit out of me i think i can work up some sort of compromise".

Because frankly speaking, Eren is not entirely right if someone would ask Bertolt for his opinion.  
You can live in the world, without understanding it even a little bit - it' more about food, sleep and tenderness, in fluid proportions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I'm sorry for a mistakes. If something is unbearable while reading please let me know :*

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This is the end of very first chapter! 
> 
> It is my first story which I have written in English. I'm afraid there is tones of mistakes, which I cannot see anymore, cause this is – sadly – as far as my knowledge in this language goes. If anything - let me know if continuing this have any sense. I wanted to write a little bit tense story and I'm not sure if my mistakes, grammar or stylistic didn't kill its sullen vibe.  
> 


End file.
